


If You're a Stranger

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, Ghost Sex, Grief/Mourning, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 22:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15010346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: They are islands in the stars, shifting between suns.





	If You're a Stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



When they reach the night beyond the sky, off to she knows not where, Leia feels her ties cut. She floats.

Adrift, as with most everyone she’d known—there is never a body for her family. Han and now Luke have been no exceptions. 

This is their burial ground. The dark between the stars. Dark, but never empty; or so many believed.

Ghosts. That’s one of the reasons she hadn’t dedicated herself to learning the Force, this new side of her Luke had brought her to recognize. 

It’s not the only reason, of course. She has long chosen the side of her that her parents raised—the one that, from what she’s learned, her biological mother embraced in life. The cause, and whatever was necessary to crusade for it. Freedom for one and all. 

Leia never holds Luke’s quests against him—not Vader, and not the choice to dedicate himself to the Jedi—but she can never share the pull to the inside rather out, shaping the galaxy where shaping was required. 

Recovering the past. It’s always been his job. She hadn’t had the time for it. Now that’s gone, and whatever he’d said on Crait, she can feel it. A separation the likes of which she’d never known from the day they’d both come into being, whatever their lives had been since. He can’t return from that, and how can she ask it after a lifetime of pulling away from the chance to learn more herself? There are things she can’t will to change. The past is one of them. 

She is for everyone, and who is he for? He is for the lonely places and old religions, old conflicts that break their galaxy, and she holds it together again. She is strong he’d said, for doing that, but this is the only way she knows to be herself, the only thing left to her over and over. The only thing that didn’t leave, and it should have. It should have let her go like Luke did, like Han and their son before him, leaving her the last of them, always the last.

Her sleep, as always, is light enough to spring from. She moves with speed, if with less energy to hide her unwillingness, at the sound of the door being opened. 

It’s a soft noise, very soft, as soft as the look on the girl behind it. She is quick too, Rey. Quick to learn and quick to take action. Leia wonders, not for the first time, how Luke took it; for all his long isolation, he’d been just the same once. And Rey had been the one to break it. 

She’s not sure what effect the girl is hoping to have, here. 

Rey isn’t telling. She’s moving, and the silence stretches as she sits beside Leia. 

They’re both learned in stillness, for one reason or another. This time, Leia is not the one who reaches for the first touch. Rey has grown in more than the teachings of the Force. 

Her hand goes to Leia’s, then her arms, the full embrace, the face on her shoulder, on her own. She lets herself fall into it, the gentle roughness familiar enough to draw a sharp breath from her lungs.

She is calm, she thinks, but the air is warm; it’s just the air, the breath of Rey, and something else besides; isn’t that familiar, she thinks, the memory of a kiss? A kiss as soft as the girl she lets prop herself above her, whatever the roughness of her hands, and Leia’s heart stutters for more reasons than the sight. There. Above her, around, the engulfing feeling, rising to swallow her from the inside when Luke was alive; is this what Rey feels, all the time—no, Leia knows. And yes, maybe. The connection. The life in them both, and beyond. 

Just beyond, but not out of reach. Not gone, Luke had said under the salt and rock of Crait, never gone. Luke, not with the dust of her family after and before him, with the girl who’d dug them out and away. With her. 

So let’s see what he has to say for himself, she thinks. Let’s see if he actually does anything, something other than make himself known. 

Leia kisses Rey. She drags her fingers down the back of Rey’s neck, gentle where her lips are not. She cradles her with her legs, pulls her hair loose, lets it catch in her teeth when Rey moves, precise under her hands, to her neck. 

Her hands are not alone. The pulsing heat of Rey as Leia grips her shoulders. The slower heat at Leia’s back, where there is no room for anything but sweat and air; yet there is more, the fingers drawn over to her hips before Rey gets there, pressure firm. 

She bucks against Rey, is pushed down against the hands she can only feel, sliding under, through her clothes to her open thighs. 

Stubborn. Allowing himself to be felt and not seen.

Rey has noticed, she realizes. No. She has known all along. Rey's head rises from between her breasts, above the sleep shirt shoved up and away; her smile is slow and sweet. It’s a gift they share, this knowing. Luke and Leia and now this new girl she had sent to bring them back together. 

Rey, flying through the dark. Flying from the lonely places, the ones buried in sand and old stories. 

Luke, flying away and flying back again. From the water of their birth, the desert, the water again; she can see it now, mark his trajectory to her. 

Leia. Always flying. 

She breathes in. Her breath, his breath. The three breathing. 

In the night of the stars, by light through her high window, Leia sees them both. 

“You have any intention of finishing the job?” She says it straight, then reaches, one hand for Rey at her hips and the other for the ghost at her thigh. She squeezes, then smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Vienna Teng's "Never Look Away."


End file.
